three word wednesday: seasons

Three Word Wednesday from Kristin Hill Taylor—time to consider Navigating New Seasons {3 Ways to Better Handle Change} – a topic everyone needs to consider now and then.


Here's my illustration of Fleetwood Mac's Landslide—for the third time! Long ago in the women's Monday evening bible study I hosted and often led, I commented "people have seasons." JHD picked up on that as astonishing, though I'd guess she simply needed that reminder at that time. Recently I wrote about frequent intermissions in our lives, but before one gets (before I once again get) too frantically anxious, we need to remember God wastes none of our experiences.

Landslide

I took my love and I took it down
Climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
Till the landslide brought me down
Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
And can I sail through the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Oh oh I don't know, oh I don't know

Fleetwood Mac, "Landslide," by Stevie Nicks

Wednesday was World Oceans Day—my WOD 2016 blog.

Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks asks, "Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?"

Life's seasons often parallel the planet's agricultural cycles. Especially if you're in school as student or instructor, almost every year you spend in the classroom you have a strong sense of beginning all over again in the autumn, planting and scattering different kinds of seeds, teaching some and learning some, getting up to speed and assessing how much you've accomplished with formal report cards or other feedback, taking a winter break, going back to continue where you left off, by late spring feeling you've accomplished a lot. Then again, denizen of academia or not, most of us can look back on chunks of several years when maybe we dared begin a particular career, job, ministry, or relationship, accumulating achievements, a time or times of slim pickings, then a fairly large harvest or possibly at the point you expected a harvest nothing's there. So you decline to continue in favor of starting over again somewhere else or with something else.

The seasons of the church's liturgical year of grace also run alongside the wheel of the year with its planting, watering, waiting, harvesting—in the northern hemisphere, that is.

But this Three Word Wednesday is about finding three better ways to navigate the many seasons of our lives, most of which don't fit neatly into a 12-month long span. I love the trio Kristin got from Melody Hester of having

(1) reasonable,

(2) flexible expectations while

(3) trusting God to be both sovereign and good.

"Navigate" is nautical; over the centuries, many church buildings have been built in the shape of an upside-down ship. So the church helps us sail through the changing ocean tides? Sometimes.

Three simply excellent ideas for myself, then. In fact, I've previously done these off and on, so they've been tested by me. And now need to be revived. By me.

1. Find a yoga class and begin practicing yoga every day. In the past I've found yoga is fabulous for mint-body-spirit integration and healing.

2. Remember. God's faithfulness. Keep reading the stories in scripture. Keep recounting to myself and to others some of my own testimony of God's faithful graciousness! And mercy.

3. Keep on trying different places and spaces to fulfill my quest for the non-virtual human understanding and support I crave and need.